did he smile his work to see
by redcat512
Summary: The banality of moving on is surprising.


**Notes:** Title from Blake's Tyger, Tyger because I'm about as creative as a bag of rocks.

* * *

_Present_

_The screaming starts up again an hour before sunrise._

_Fenris groans into the mattress before he pushes himself up and out of the bed he'd only fallen into an hour or so ago._

_"This," he irritably says out loud, "is exactly why you should never trust mages. If they're not turning into abominations, they're saddling you with all sorts of problems that you'd never have had on your own."_

_The screaming cuts off at the sound of his voice._

_"Then again," Fenris addresses his newfound housemate, and gives up on the idea of going back to sleep any time soon, "I suppose you'd know all about that, wouldn't you?"_

* * *

_Past_

His very first memory was of waking up to mind-rending pain.

That had been after the lyrium procedure, and he was told after that he was lucky he'd survived.

_Lucky_, he'd repeated blankly to himself, and in the coming days, it had occurred to him to wonder at that, to wish he'd been luckier still and _hadn't_ lived.

* * *

What followed after were years of training, of learning, of becoming the perfect servant. Slave, really, but he'd never thought of it in like that. Not then.

Danarius was strict, and he was harsh, but he was rarely unpredictable – he had his rules, and Fenris followed them, and so did Danarius.

* * *

Before the pain from the lyrium under his skin had even begun to fade, the training began, and it wasn't gentle.

Efwyn trained him. She, too, was of elvhen blood, but she never showed the slightest signs of camaraderie or kinship towards Fenris. If anything, sometimes Fenris fancied she was hard on him _because_ of his blood.

"Again." She'd say after he'd fallen onto his knees, knuckles bleeding from where he's tried to punch hard enough to phase through the dummy target.

She'd allow him exactly long enough for his muscles to go from screaming with pain to a dull roar before she'd physically force him up and throw him towards the target. Slight though her skeletal build was, Efwyn trained and fought like a vicious cat, and had the musculature to throw him around the training room without breaking a sweat. Though, in those days, that didn't take much.

Danarius would receive weekly updates from Efwyn, but Fenris was never present for those. The only knowledge he had of Danarius' reaction to his progress (or lack of) was Danarius' face during those rare times that Danarius would visit a training session. His face would always remain blank, but he'd tilt his shoulders away from Fenris and pseudo-sympathetically towards Efwyn as she recounted all the ways in which Fenris was less than adequate. There was always an air of quiet disappointment to his back when Danarius would leave to go on with his day.

Danarius was predictable, and rarely anything other than perfectly controlled, but in some ways, that was worse.

The self-preservative, cautious, thoughtful part of Fenris appreciated that, and followed the rules as best as he could because Danarius could be counted on to react – if not well, then at least well enough – to consistent obedience, improvement and obvious effort.

The stupid, self-loathing, dangerous part of him saw it as a challenge, and couldn't resist the urge to pick at that self-control, to try to set Danarius off, whether by purposefully misunderstanding orders, by being just a fraction of a second too slow to obey, or being a hair's width on the wrong side of the line between obedience and mockery.

There, too, Danarius reacted predictably, and remained completely in control, but it was never as harmless as his approval.

* * *

Years passed, and with them, the curiosity that once drove him, the desire to find out who he was, whether he had family, why he was in Danarius' household.

It didn't matter, he'd think to himself, because who he was now was clear enough to him without someone else recounting a story to him. He was a fighter, a servant, and a tool. Slave, yes, but that wasn't a part of his identity. He was the perfectly honed blade Danarius relied on to get things done, he was the weapon his master's enemies feared almost as much as they feared Danarius himself.

That was the way things were, and that was the way they would be, and Fenris was alright with that. There was, after all, a certain beauty to being such a perfected and valuable instrument.

* * *

Things didn't stay that way.

Seheron happened, and with it the Qunari attack.

He has little memory of fighting his way out of the city, whether due to loss of blood or loss of direction, he's still not entirely sure.

The Fog Warriors found him feverish, delirious and half-starved, and doubtfully took him in. They weren't soft or kind by any stretch of the imagination, but they were just and fair, and strong and fierce and proud. They let him earn his keep by helping to hunt and to keep watch, and he tried to live up to the trust they had given him so relatively easily.

He missed the purpose he'd had with Danarius, though, and it was hard. He still had a master, in a way, but one that didn't need him in the same way that Danarius had. If Fenris left tomorrow, the Fog Warrior chieftain would have gravely wished him a prosperous journey and easily sent him on his way. Fenris' skill at killing prey or enemies was valuable to them, but not irreplaceable.

* * *

When Danarius came for him, it was like a heavy weight had been taken from his shoulders, and at the same time, like he'd been jolted abruptly out of a pleasant dream.

When he'd contemplated the option at all, he'd thought, he'd hoped, he'd dreaded – that going back to Danarius again would be like going back to training after time off under the care of a healer. Stiff, sore, and unused to the motions, but basically familiar and easy to slip back into the rhythm of.

In some ways it was. When Danarius ordered the death of the Fog Warriors, Fenris' body obeyed without his mind even engaging on any new level of questioning that he might have picked up in his time in the jungle. His movement was sleek, swift, effortless, thoughtless. It was all the easier for the element of surprise.

The order was easy to obey. It was after that was the trouble.

It was when immediate motion and smooth destruction were no longer there as distractions to shield him from it, that the betrayal he'd just wrought had finally sunk in.

There wasn't any other option after that. It was the cowardly option of course, to run away – from Danarius, from the tragedy his own hands had fashioned, from the realisation that he was no longer worthy of having meaning and order in his life – but it was the only possible option because he was nothing more than a coward anyway.

* * *

After the immediacy of his need to escape everything and everyone (Maker willing, even his own self), the doubt and uncertainty began to creep in. Some part of him wondered if it were even possible to escape, and kept waiting to wake up to Efwyn's face as she sneers at his incompetence, and at Danrius' disgusted rejection of him. He dreaded and longed for it in the same measures, but escaping from Danarius' pursuit turned out to be almost shamefully easy. He couldn't possibly be glad, though, not when it felt like yet another failure.

* * *

Danarius never really gave up, though, and kept sending people after him. Fenris fled, at first, using the lyrium under his skin to phase to insubstantiality to escape.

He moved on to another city, tried to hide his tracks better.

The hunters came again. He fled again.

On the third time, he accidentally killed one of them by phasing through him.

It felt like another failure. He was more than an expense now – he'd damaged Danarius' property. The possibility of a return to how things were dwindled further and further away.

He fled again, but the next time the remaining three hunters found him, he laid a trap for them and killed them all.

Some blindly optimistic part of him assumed that that would be that, but he wasn't surprised – not really – when the next group found him again.

* * *

He kept running, kept hiding.

Sometimes he'd get a few weeks of peace. He'd get to know the local merchants at the market, the sailors drunk in the pubs, the barkeeps who'd throw them out and sometimes pay Fenris a few silver to do it for them.

Somewhere along the line, he got tired of constantly feeling like he's digging himself a bigger and bigger hole, and just let everything go, instead. All the fear, some of the guilt, a tiny bit of the responsibility. He was sick of living in fear of punishment, of being hunted like an animal.

Somewhere along the line, Fenris stopped believing wholeheartedly that he deserved this.

He was in the city of Kirkwall when he decided to face his pursuers once and for all. He'll move on soon after, he told himself. No reason to stay.

* * *

**Notes: **This fic will tend to be a collection of story arcs that are part of a larger whole. These arcs will be about most of the party members, but overlying story is about Fenris and his buckets of issues. Pre-canon, during canon and possibly post-canon. Mostly intended to be canon-compliant.

Updates may be sporadic, subject to uni and work, but I will try to have something up at least every couple of weeks. Usually uni pressure turns me into shakespeare anyway because procrastination.

Feedback of any sort is always greatly appreciated. 3


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